[siegecraft]

I'm not familiar with the myth of having to be a genius to learn clojure. Not having an assignment operator is the same problem anyone would have in trying to move from an imperative to a functional language.

You can be productive in clojure, I think, without being extremely fluent. But Clojure does tend to some perl-esque terseness. Browsing down this page (http://clojure.org/reader) everything is fine until you start getting into macro characters, and then the dispatch macro, and then the regex dispatch macro. I think you could write perfectly fine clojure code without knowing the details of all of these, but it can be frustrating to not know if your code is idiomatic clojure or merely badly translated from another language.

[SpaceCadetJones]

I've definitely been experiencing the frustration of not knowing whether or not I'm writing idiomatic Clojure or not. Looking through the actual Clojure + other's source code and occasionally asking on IRC when I feel like I'm doing something wrong has been a big help.